ISVs and Linux Standards

What I’d like to find out is, what do ISVs want from Linux? By ISV I mean companies like Alias, Apple, MindJet, etc. Possibly in naive zeal, or just oversight, the open source community has mostly left these folks out. Or maybe they’ve left themselves out. Maybe they are late to the party because they haven’t had the resources to spend on figuring out the right way to move their apps to Linux. Certainly there is a wrong way, which is to pick one or two distributions and certify against them, leaving the
others out. This certification practice is common right now. Unfortunately it adds political hurdles to the aready difficult problem of making diverse Linux environments interoperable from the ISV’s perspective..

What is needed is a stable ABI that ISVs can write apps against. Once an ABI has been defined, there needs to be a straightforward way to verify that the expected ABI is present and correct.

So far ABI stability has been “certified” by the Linux Standard Base for only a few core libraries. The effort to move from monolithic
standard to a modular
one is a step in the right direction.